Interactive Genesis2 GUI

The Genesis2 GUI is a friendly internet browser-based graphical user interface that lets you quickly and easily design custom chips. It reads and manipulates the convenient XML chip format provided by the Genesis2 chip generation system.

The GUI can run as part of a new or existing standard web server, such as apache, and/or it can run as a standalone in user space using its own perl-based mini-webserver. The apache-based GUI is called the standard GUI, the original GUI or just "the GUI," while the mini-server version is known as "Stewie the standalone GUI." A third, non-server-based version of the GUI, called guisada the true standalone GUI, uses a command line interface to call the GUI perl scripts directly. Guisada is useful to help the GUI developers debug their scripts, but is not generally recommended for end users.

In sum, there are three flavors of GUI:

the Original GUI, designed to run under an existing web server installation such as apache;

Stewie the Standalone GUI, designed to run in user space; and

Guisada, which for development purposes can run the GUI perl scripts directly from the unix command line.

To add a generator design to the gui, you first need a working
generator and makefile that is capable of running under the GUI
environment (i.e. using the GUI's setup.csh). In particular, if the
generator lives in a directory <GENDIR> and the GUI is in <GUIDIR>,
then the following sequence must be able to run without error:

The GUI maintains a design list whose
location is indicated in the config file. In the example below,
the design list is found in
/var/www/homepage/genesis/configs/design_list_stanford.txt
and it contains two designs "FFTGenerator" and "CGRA"